Alfresco raises $45 million to boost ECM market share

IPO coming soon?

Nearly 10 years after it was founded, Alfresco Software has received its biggest funding yet, $45 billion (about £28 million, AU$50 million), from a number of investors led by Sageview Capital.

That amount dwarfs the previous investments and bring the total money injected in the open source enterprise content management (ECM) provider to $65.2 million (about £40 million, AU$70 million).

The company, which is based in the UK, wants to "increase velocity of its Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy globally" by adding sales people, ingesting in marketing and "expanding development to drive the SaaS-ification of the content market".

SAP again?

The move comes as the company failed to move from "Visionary" in Gartner's ECM Magic Quadrant to "Leader" for five year in a row. Still the company managed to grow by more than 30% year-on-year, three times faster than the overall ECM market according to its own figures.

It is worth noting that SAP Ventures is one of the VC investing in that latest round. Although it is independent from software giant SAP, it gets all its capital from the latter.

Why is it worth underlining? Doug Dennerline, the CEO of Alfresco, joined the company in January 2013 from SuccessFactors who was acquired in 2012 by none other than .... SAP. Could lightning strike twice?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré (Twitter, Google+) has been musing and writing about technology since 1997. Following an eight-year stint at ITProPortal.com where he discovered the joys of global techfests, developing an uncanny attraction for anything silicon, Désiré now heads up TechRadar Pro.